A Simulation Study for Quality of Chest Compression Provided by Health Personnel / 대한구급학회지

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Effective chest compression may improve the return of spontaneous circulation and neurologic outcome in arrest victims. For fear of rescuer's fatigue, guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) recommended that chest compression (CC) should be switched every 2 minutes, but there is little evidence. We investigated whether health personnel could provide consistent quality of CC for 2 minutes. METHODS: We recruited prospectively health personnel working on one university hospital. On the day assigned randomly, CPR performance data was collected with use of CPR recording technology. Quality of CPR was calculated every 30 seconds interval. To identify the quality decay, we used repeated measure analysis of variance with SPSS 17.0 for analysis. RESULTS: We analyzed 8,485 CCs performed by 41 subjects. Total number of CC decayed between 90 to 120 seconds (51.6 +/- 3.3 to 50.8 +/- 3.5, p = 0.020) within recommended range. The ratio of correct depth CC decayed between 90 to 120 seconds, falling from 83.4 +/- 24.9% to 68.3 +/- 38.4% (p = 0.002). The ratio of low depth CC increased significantly over time (10.2 +/- 20.7% to 31.3 +/- 38.5%, p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Health personnel may provide adequate number of CC for 2 minutes. But, the number of correct depth CC may decay between 90 to 120 seconds. Also the number of low depth CC may increase over time.